Tell me about a conflict you had with a teammate.

Last summer I was one of two interns on a team at a bank. The other intern, Priya, and I were splitting a 30-page pitch book for a client meeting. One morning I came in and found she had redone eight of my slides overnight without telling me. I was annoyed, and my first instinct was to go to our associate. So I asked her to get coffee and told her what I'd seen. I said how it had felt and asked for her side. She said the associate had messaged her at 11 at night with comments on my section because I'd already logged off, and she fixed them instead of waking me up. So the real problem was how the two of us handed off work. We agreed to communicate better about changes going forward. The book went out on time, and for the rest of the summer we reviewed each other's pages before anything went up. It worked out well in the end.

Last summer I was one of two interns on a team at a bank. The other intern, Priya, and I were splitting a 30-page pitch book for a client meeting. One morning I came in and found she had redone eight of my slides overnight without telling me. I was annoyed, and my first instinct was to go to our associate. I'm glad I didn't. I looked at her versions first, and honestly five of the eight were better than mine. So I asked her to get coffee and told her what I'd seen. I said, "Your versions of the comps slides are better and I want to keep them. But I found out by opening the file, and that made me feel like you don't trust my work. What happened?" She said the associate had messaged her at 11 at night with comments on my section because I'd already logged off, and she fixed them instead of waking me up. She thought she was doing me a favor. So the real problem was how the two of us handed off work. I proposed two rules. We'd keep a change log at the front of the file, and either of us could text the other up to midnight if comments came in on their section. I also asked the associate to copy us both on feedback. The book went out on time, and for the rest of the summer we reviewed each other's pages before anything went up. The associate told us at the end that ours was the cleanest intern work he'd seen that year, and Priya and I both got return offers. What I changed is that I check what happened before I decide what it means. I'd built a whole story about her in ten minutes, and it was wrong.